Brian Sietsema is the official pronouncer for the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the linguist competitors turn to when a word's pronunciation or etymology is disputed on the national stage. He is also a Greek Orthodox priest. That combination is not an accident. It traces back to a third-grade garage sale, 50 cents, a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories, and a single word, akimbo, that stumped Sietsema, his parents, and every teacher he asked, for years.
Sietsema studied linguistics at MIT under Morris Halle, a foundational figure in generative grammar. His dissertation analyzed metrical stress patterns across four Bantu languages spoken in Tanzania, work that had direct implications for machine-generated speech research. Before MIT, he studied at the University of Michigan across five years, accumulating fluency in ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek, ancient Aramaic, modern Arabic, Dutch, Swedish, and German. He cross-registered at Harvard for French and Ugaritic. He now counts roughly a dozen languages studied in total.
The full article is worth reading not for the career summary but for the texture: a third-grader who starts a forbidden book immediately, a second-grade speller who overthinks the word 'of' and spells it U-V, and a linguistics grad student who answers his mentor's structural analysis of Psalm 23 with his own counter-analysis of Psalm 90. Sietsema on his MIT years: 'If I could relive them, I would empty out my bank accounts to do so.'
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